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Ask HN: Is it time to resurrect a Usenet clone?

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Re: Ask HN: Is it time to resurrect a Usenet clone?

#91

Post by zilti »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #79

Yes. But you have to do it in the way that Usenet was built and you may not like that. I was intelca!cem on Usenet. Modem charges (phone calls) weren't free outside the local calling zone, and places like Berkeley (ucbvax) were often "hubs" that could use university resources to move data over longer distances. Every node had all the data, so system administrators had to come up with schemes for what to delete and wh…

So basically you want the clients to store their data themselves? I actually thought about such a thing as well, but that would have severe performance implications, or require a DHT-like storage where stuff gets chopped up and replicated on a bunch of other clients, meaning those other clients would not only have to offer extra storage, but also experience a lot of bandwidth usage.

Re: Ask HN: Is it time to resurrect a Usenet clone?

#93

Post by MagicMoonlight »

tomtheelder wrote: post #57
jsz0 wrote: post #25

We desperately need something like this to happen before it's too late. We are dangerously close to a total corporate stranglehold on digital free speech. The current generation of kids coming to age are growing up in a world where they don't even know a time when you could say whatever the hell you wanted to online. If we don't save digital free speech now it's gonna be lost forever.

You can still say whatever you want online. You just can't guarantee an audience, but that was _never_ the case.

Just make your own financial system bro

Re: Ask HN: Is it time to resurrect a Usenet clone?

#94

Post by whartung »

jsz0 wrote: post #25

We desperately need something like this to happen before it's too late. We are dangerously close to a total corporate stranglehold on digital free speech. The current generation of kids coming to age are growing up in a world where they don't even know a time when you could say whatever the hell you wanted to online. If we don't save digital free speech now it's gonna be lost forever.

It must be my grognard roots. The bulk of my on line participation is in long running, old school, private (i.e. hosted by a very small concern hosting ads for hosting money, vs some large entity, most anyone can join these should they so wish), "phpbb" style bulletin boards that focus on the niches I enjoy. I am not active on any "large" social media sites, save for, perhaps, StackOverflow and it's sub-genres (and even there, not much).

It's disappointing I can not find such forums for all of my interests, but I muddle through and get by.

Obviously I'm a minority of 1, the populations of all these sites in terms of active, posting participants, is well south of 1000. Maybe south of 100...that's hard to say. I don't know how much reach these sites have in terms of lurkers watching us old folks quibble, but some of them are well known in their genres or communities (both geographical and internet-wide).

Re: Ask HN: Is it time to resurrect a Usenet clone?

#95

Post by SllX »

myself248 wrote: post #73
joezydeco wrote: post #4

Usenet thrived in a time where most of us trusted each other, traffic was an order of magnitude lighter, trolls were few, spam was unheard of, and moderation - if any - was cheap and painless. I honestly believe those times are past us. And I say that as someone that loved Usenet back in the day. What you're asking for, for free , isn't possible.

The costs of transporting Usenet weren't zero, they were simply borne by your ISP because it was understood as a necessary part of internet access. I think that's what we're missing here. If we simply paid for this stuff as part of our regular internet bill again, we could solve a lot of the "nothing works for free" problems.

Then we would be subject to the moderation policy’s of our ISPs. No thanks.

It is way easier for me to create and delete an account at any number of websites than it is for me to change ISPs; and I don’t need any bill on my internet bill when I can just Apple Pay for whatever.

Re: Ask HN: Is it time to resurrect a Usenet clone?

#96

Post by indus »

Buttons840 wrote: post #49
knowledge-clay wrote: post #31

The solution to a lot of problems is simply to not scale platforms past something like 1000 users. At that level, you can have a community that is guided by individual people and their relationships, rather than anonymized and centralized. And the infrastructure is much simpler to set up and maintain: we just need more tools tailored to being easy to set up and administer at this scale. m15o has built a ton of exampl…

There was an Ask HN (or similar) a while ago where someone was saying that they run a Discord server for active and committed independent game developers, and they were asking if anyone was interested in joining (I can't remember exactly). They wouldn't let just anyone in, to get in you had to schedule an interview with the moderators and show that you were a committed game developer. They were a tight community who…

Most of these platforms are highly opinionated—-colors, buttons, text to dissuade or attract users of one specific kind.

Re: Ask HN: Is it time to resurrect a Usenet clone?

#97

Post by indus »

scrame wrote: post #35
shadowgovt wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the post-truth era, (3) will become increasingly vital because reputation is the only tool we have to distinguish signal from noise.

and reputation is what, reddit karma? fb likes? prom king? blue checks on Twitter? FORMER bluechecks? Its the opposite of an open platform to rank people by the same social media stuff that OP is saying doesn't work because it still wants a centralized form of reputation. You can't resurrect the old usenet the way OP is talking about because he doesn't know what usenet was.

reputation is a lazy filter.

Re: Ask HN: Is it time to resurrect a Usenet clone?

#98

Post by JohnFen »

myself248 wrote: post #73
joezydeco wrote: post #4

Usenet thrived in a time where most of us trusted each other, traffic was an order of magnitude lighter, trolls were few, spam was unheard of, and moderation - if any - was cheap and painless. I honestly believe those times are past us. And I say that as someone that loved Usenet back in the day. What you're asking for, for free , isn't possible.

The costs of transporting Usenet weren't zero, they were simply borne by your ISP because it was understood as a necessary part of internet access. I think that's what we're missing here. If we simply paid for this stuff as part of our regular internet bill again, we could solve a lot of the "nothing works for free" problems.

> they were simply borne by your ISP

Well, not necessarily your ISP. I've never had an ISP that supplied Usenet feeds. But yes, the cost was borne by somebody that wasn't you. (Probably -- if you didn't have access to someone else's Usenet feeds, there were services that would provide one to you for a fee.)

Re: Ask HN: Is it time to resurrect a Usenet clone?

#99

Post by JohnFen »

kelseyfrog wrote: post #72
gregw134 wrote: post #7

Two years ago this is where someone would chime in with a blockchain-based solution, paying moderators with usenetcoin.

I was one of those people. I still think that holocratic/syndicated moderation is worth trying as a social experiment. I also still think that centralized moderation as a single source of truth is the meta-debate in online spaces. However, since the wind is gone from the crypto-sails, I don't think it's practically viable over short and medium timescales.

> I still think that holocratic/syndicated moderation is worth trying as a social experiment.

Well, I doubt many people would argue against that.

The blockchain arguments weren't really about that, though. They were about whether or not a specific mechanism (blockchain) was an appropriate one to achieve that.

Re: Ask HN: Is it time to resurrect a Usenet clone?

#100

Post by JohnFen »

e40 wrote: post #62
joezydeco wrote: post #4

Usenet thrived in a time where most of us trusted each other, traffic was an order of magnitude lighter, trolls were few, spam was unheard of, and moderation - if any - was cheap and painless. I honestly believe those times are past us. And I say that as someone that loved Usenet back in the day. What you're asking for, for free , isn't possible.

There was spam, for sure. There were also "kill files" for readers, which were immensely helpful in removing trolls from your stream. And there were some epic trolls, back in the day. Xah Lee comes to mind. He actually has an interesting website ( http://xahlee.info/ ), which I found recently when searching for a solution to an elisp problem. Yes, he was a troll on comp.lang.lisp.

Killfiles were a wonderful (if imperfect) thing. They basically let everyone be their own personal moderator.
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